(What better way to start a thread than with a Simpsons reference?)
Yesterday I began taking Zoloft. It’s an anti-depressant, somewhat similar to Prozac, though I’m told it’s better for people with non-anxiety depression, which is what I have. They have those “Poring commercials”, as one chatter put it, advertising the stuff.
At first I was not very cool with the idea of even having depression, let alone having it bad enough to warrant taking drugs for it. But I found that there are a lot of misconceptions about depression, especially among men because the way we deal with depression is generally different from the way women deal with it, and womens’ depression is the kind you normally hear about. A lot of times I don’t even feel sad, it’s just I lose my motivation and energy… sometimes I get really pissed off, and usually that means taking it out on myself. But what was the most concern to me and my therapist was that frequently I felt depressed for no reason at all. There was absolutely nothing that caused me to feel that way. I tend to worry excessively, usually assuming the worst when it comes to how well I’m liked by others. To give you an example, in spite of how great my Valentine’s Day went yesterday, I still am afraid that I did something to offend this girl. Even though all the signs seem to point to her liking me, I still worry if she really does.
My depression isn’t severe, it’s pretty mild. But I have a mind with habits of latching onto thoughts and amplifying them a hundredfold. So if I have a depressing thought, I’ll often ruminate about it until it becomes unmanageable. There are a few things I know that help me with it, like excercising, but when I’m depressed it’s all I can do to get out of bed in the morning, let alone make it to the gym. I’m hoping the medicine will give me a jump start so that I can get into a more permanent behavior pattern that won’t require drugs to maintain. I don’t plan on being a drugee for the rest of my life, that’s for sure.
My grandfather had clinical depression =( Kind of came out of nowhere, because he was normally really happy, but now that i think back on it i can see where i came from. He went straight from high-school to the army (he didn’t do korea though), then they put him on as active-anti-tank duty in vietnam, and then 3 days after he got out of the service, he got a high stress job working for TWA. Then when TWA closed, we all thought he finally going to get a break, but he got picked right back up (in a matter of hours) by NorthWest. That was around '95. '96 the Hub in philly closed, as NorthWest was in the process of moving away from a hub and spoke design, and he got sent to TIA, Tampa Intl, where he worked the same high-impact and high stress job, but now he had to do it in 100+ degree weather, all year (in philly he got less hours during snow).
I was around '98 that he started having to take medicine. I don’t know what pills he had to take, but they really fucked him up. If i didn’t know any better, i’d say he was WORSE on the pills than he was off of them. He stopped taking them after about 6 months, and they forced him into a mental hospital. It wasn’t that he was crazy or anything, its just that he had grown up being told that medicine was the ‘cheaters way out’ and he should just suck it up and take it. I think it was this kind of ‘take-it-like-a-man’ ideology that made him pack it all and become chemically depressed in the first place.
In any case, he fought them in court, and then got himself out of the hospital. He’s fine now, because he has taught himself how to be happy and normal without having to use drugs, and he’s overcome whatever issues were causing him to be depressed in the first place.
It really sucks that you’re depressed kero, but at least you’re on the way to recovery. Good luck man. Are you going to be taking them indefinitly? Or are you going to be phased off of them later?
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, <i>he still works full time</i>. He even works double shifts sometimes too, doing the same job he’s been doing since he got out of vietnam.
My only advice is - be wary. Anti-depressants are not nearly as fine-cut as psychiatrists want you to believe. In fact, prescribing them is often like a bad plumbing job - ‘You feel depressed? Well, maybe if we loosen this pipe in your brain a little… Too much? Let’s tighten it a little more’ etc. That said, if it works for you, great.
I hear you man, loud and clear. It happens to me once in a while. Sometimes it’s something totaly insignificant, but i could think about that shit for days and even weeks. I hope Zoloft helps you. Good luck and good health.
I know those feelings all too well. They’re the feelings that have been holding me back from doing what I want to do with my life. It’s like you get up one day, knowing that you have to go to class or write that essay or meet someone somewhere, and you just think to yourself “Why bother? I’m not going to do well anyway.”, and then you just end up doing absolutely nothing.
I’ve never been on anti-depressants, or anything of the sort. I prefer to self-medicate, seriously. I trust myself more than a mickey-mouse-degree, doc-in-a-box who makes money off pretending to be a telepath, especially in reference to what I’m thinking.
About Zoloft causing suicide, that was one of the things that I talked about with my doctor, who was the one that prescribed the stuff – my therapist is only a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, so she can’t prescribe me anything. But the studies are pretty inconclusive. They go back and forth: one month you’ll see “OMG ZOLOFT = DETH” and then the next month you’ll see “NO IT DUZNT FAGT”. Basically what they’ve seen is that because Zoloft tends to make you more energetic, it can be dangerous for someone who’s already suicidal. If you get on it and you’re already wanting to kill yourself but too depressed to actually do it, then start taking something that makes you more motivated, you can imagine what will happen. I’ve also heard that some teenagers reported increasing thoughts about suicide when going on the drug, but there wasn’t any increase in the actual number of suicides.
I’m aware of the side-effects and other things to look out for. If I start thinking a lot of about suicide, obviously I’m going to stop taking it. I’m starting out with a low enough dose anyway.
Even though… I just started feeling the effects an hour or so ago. I feel focused and a bit fuzzy. It’s weird, it’s sort of like when you play video games drunk. You can play them perfectly, based on your reflexes, but there’s like this delay, or you’re watching someone else do it. Plus it’s making me really horny. ::dekar!::
Anti-depressants can be beneficial, I guess. I’ve never had to take them, although I’ve had friends who had to. And once a friend of mine decided to take about 12 of them once. He was fucked for weeks! his pupils randomly dialated, and he’d start sweating and stuff, but it went away eventually. Oh, and he wasn’t prescribed them.
Never took any, but I probably should. I find myself getting fatigued all the time, upset about even the littlest things, and I barely feel motivated anymore. I swear, I want to do so much, but it’s like my body won’t let me; it’s too stressed. The strangest thing happens to me sometimes. I’ll be in a situation with a lot of people and all of a sudden, everything would go on autopilot. It’s like I have no control of anything and I’m just watching everything I’m doing from somewhere else. I get really scared during those times, because I’m afraid I’ll do something wrong and it won’t be my fault. Does that happen to you?
EDIT:
Zoloft is the shit that one of the two shooters in the Columbine Massacre was on for depression before the massacre, 6 months or so… just watching a thing now on it actually.
Not saying you’re going to turn into a crazy homicidal maniac, but it does go a little mental…
He was planning on killing his classmates long before six months. I believe that it was a plan that they hatched up in the beginning of the year. The meeting of two sick minds had more to do with it than some anti-depressant drug.
I wish you the best of fortune with your endeavour, Kero.
I myself am on another anti-depressant, Celaxa. When I first began taking it (August 2003), I got placebo effect, but after that subsided, I felt that it had really no effect. Now I am coming off of it (my present dosage is 30 mg each day, or half a tablet), since I am doing better on the whole, and I should be finished with it about my birthday in the latter half of April.
Kero: I was prescribed antidepressants when I was in my early teens. As I have mentioned here before, my older sister kept taking me to psychologists because she was convinced that my fascination with cartoons and comics (especially the fact I wrote fanfiction!) was abnormal and would ruin my life. This despite my good grades and behaviour. One of the shrinks decided I was depressed and gave them to me. What he failed to realize was that I was depressed because my own sister was taking me to a shrink. I don’t remember the pills having had any effect at all; in any case, I soon stopped seeing the doctor (My sister went off to study in Mexico, and I just didn’t feel comfortable talking to the guy) and never took them again.
Ironically, I DID suffer from a major case of depression, while studying in College. The stress was enormous and I had no one to talk to (even my friends and relatives were busy with their own lives). I certainly could’ve used talking to a professional about it at the time. Instead I dropped from College, a mistake I regret to this day.
Personally, I think talking sessions, or group support, are better than taking drugs, but I realize they can be helpful sometimes, especially when dealing with depression caused by metabolic causes. The thing is, we ARE all different, biochemicaly, psychologicaly AND in our personal circumstances. So, what can be a wonderful help for one person might be disastrous for another. The best we can do is be careful, and try things out until we find something that works for each of us. It sounds like you’re aware of that, so I think things will work out for you. I certainly hope so.
It’s not the crazy side of it that I’m trying to get at, but the side-effect of causing “extra energy”. Just saying, that if anything, no matter how small, (maybe a bad example here, being larger and all), but it can be expanded to unknown degrees…
But yes, Sin, it was what one of them was on, sorry can’t remember names at the moment
